John Reynders joins Moderna Therapeutics as chief information officer

Moderna Therapeutics, a Cambridge company specializing in messenger RNA therapeutics as a way to create new drugs, said Wednesday that John Reynders will join Moderna in early July as its first chief information officer.

Reynders joins Moderna from AstraZeneca, where he served as vice president of R&D information, and has held senior leadership positions over the past decade at Johnson & Johnson, Lilly, and Celera Genomics.

At Moderna, Reynders will lead a team that seeks to create an information infrastructure critical to all aspects of the company’s innovation model, including the use of genomic data in drug design.

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“We are building a company capable of driving innovation on a scale and at a pace that were unimaginable until recently, and our information systems must be able to fuel that vision,” Stéphane Bancel, founding president and CEO of Moderna, said in a statement. “John has long been on the forefront of the information revolution that is reshaping drug development and health care, and he has a strong vision for how we can design an information resource capable of propelling Moderna – and the entire field of messenger RNA therapeutics—well into the future.”

Messenger RNA therapeutics is a new drug modality that produces human proteins or antibodies inside patient cells. This platform addresses currently undruggable targets and offers a superior alternative to existing drug modalities for a wide range of disease conditions.

In a separate announcement, the venture capital firm Flagship Ventures said that Moderna CEO Bancel has been appointed a senior partner at the firm, where he will provide strategic counsel and support to Flagship’s portfolio companies. Bancel will remain as Moderna’s chief executive.